Brian Phillips uses the essay form to map the limits of America’s cultural-historical imagination, from our highest achievements to our kitschiest expressions of who we think we are, and who we think everyone else is.
non-fiction
Book Review: A Well-Rounded Look at Napoleon the Man and the Myth
Andrew Roberts has succeeded in a single volume in reconciling the two faces of this historical colossus.
Book Review: Memoir as Love Letter — “Into the Garden with Charles”
Into the Garden with Charles reads like a great love letter: beautifully written, full of feeling, a document of an intimate connection that never lost its wonder for the author.
Fuse Book Review: Losing it — Whining Against the Dying of the Light
Losing It” explores growing old through an assemblage of tales and lessons drawn from works of the past—the Icelandic Sagas, the classics, the Bible, the Torah—to which the author adds a plenitude of his own dicta and pensées, slinging the whole contraption together on a webbing of extrapolation and free association.
Book Review: ‘Making Toast’
Although the memoir has been called luminous, wise, humble, piercing, and all sorts of other laudatory adjectives, it is, nevertheless, not an easy book to read because you keep wondering how you would manage in this situation. Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, Ecco Press, 166 pages, $21.00 Reviewed by Roberta Silman At the end of […]
Book Review: Digging Mud, Sweat, and Gears
Joe Kurmaskie’s latest book, Mud, Sweat, and Gears, is funny, genuine, and inspiring. And it isn’t just a memoir about the Kurmaskie family’s epic bike trip across Canada one summer; it’s about the mud, sweat, and gears that keep a family together. Mud, Sweat, and Gears: A Rowdy Family Bike Adventure Across Canada on Seven […]
Critical Condition: The Book Review Blues
ArtsFuse editor Bill Marx speaks with Gail Pool, the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, about the slow decline of literary criticism in the United States.